Beach taken from Black family to be returned
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County plans to return prime beachfront property to descendants of a Black couple who built a seaside resort for African Americans but suffered racist harassment and were stripped of it by local city leaders a century ago, a county official said Friday.
“It is the county’s intention to return this property,” said Janice Hahn, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
The decision in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, comes at a time of national reckoning on race and discussions at the local, state and federal levels over reparations.
It comes after multiple property transfers over the decades. Today, a county lifeguard training headquarters building sits on the property along some of the most coveted coastline in Southern California.
The property encompasses two parcels purchased in 1912 by Willa and Charles Bruce, who built the first West Coast resort for Black people at a time when segregation barred them from many beaches.
The Bruces and their customers were harassed by white neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan attempted to burn it down. The Manhattan Beach City Council finally used eminent domain to take the land away from the Bruces in the 1920s.
“The Bruces had their California dream stolen from them,” Hahn said. “And this was an injustice inflicted not just upon Willa and Charles Bruce but generations of their descendants who almost certainly would have been millionaires if they had been able to keep this property and their successful business.”
After lying unused for years, the land was transferred to the state of California in 1948 and in 1995 it was transferred to Los Angeles County for beach operations and maintenance.
The last transfer came with restrictions that limit the ability to sell or transfer the property and can only be lifted through a new state law, Hahn said.
State Sen. Steven Bradford said that on Monday he will introduce legislation, SB 796, that would exempt the land from those restrictions.
“After so many years we will right this injustice,” he said.
If the law passes, the transfer to the descendants would have to be approved by the county’s five-member Board of Supervisors, said Liz Odendahl, Hahn’s director of communications.
Manhattan Beach is now a tony city of about 35,000 people on the south shore of Santa Monica Bay. Its picturesque pier juts into swells prized by surfers, and luxury residences have replaced many of the beach houses along an oceanfront walk called The Strand. According to Census data, its population is 78% white and 0.5% Black.